Gartner recently released its latest installment of the Magic Quadrant for Analytics & Business Intelligence Platforms for 2021. Cloud ecosystems, augmented analytics and alignment with productivity tools are prominent themes in the report, while Microsoft’s Power BI cloud services has continued to lead the charge in this space, dominating the market in terms of user adoption. Power BI’s adoption is fueled by the bundling with Office 365 at a greatly reduced price and the integration with Microsoft Teams. If you’re like many others and have decided on Microsoft Power BI, here we explore some key considerations in ensuring successful Power BI adoption to get the most out of your investment and accelerate time to insights.
Successful adoption of any modern analytics and business intelligence platform requires a change in people, processes, data and technology. So, all of these elements need to be considered upfront, as deploying Power BI without the appropriate planning and preparation sets the organisation up for several challenges down the road. With this in mind there are a few things that organisations need to consider for any Power BI project to make it successful such as:
- Identify use cases that can deliver tangible value throughout the organisation, this is always a good place to start.
- Leverage these use cases to build the supporting business case.
- Determine the deployment model(s) for the organisation in terms of who needs to access information, for what and when.
- Work across numerous departments and business units to enable Power BI adoption. What onboarding & training plan has been put in place & how have you involved business users in the project upfront?
- Identify data sources and how will data be organised, refreshed and accessed. Have data modelling best practices been established?
- Build content (Dashboards and Reports) that delivers value to the business community & identify how this will be distributed and shared.
- What Power BI data storage option(s) will be used?
- Position self-service analytics as a strategic program leveraging the Power BI platform. How will functionality be set up, enabled and restricted? How will you manage Power BI security?
- Ensure a plan is in place to receive on-going support and enhancements & how will Power BI be administered & monitored?
These are just a snapshot of a few things that need to be considered to improve Power BI adoption. Another is senior level business support. Many people think that it only takes one senior-level management champion to cut through cross functional confusion and get things done. However experience has shown that cross-functional teams will often resist change, so it often takes a unified effort on the part of senior management to get BI software implementations completed, so keep this in mind.
If you’d like to know more about how to drive Power BI adoption within your business then reach out to our team of consultants at BoomData, as we specialise in designing and delivering agile Microsoft data and analytics platforms.
